. . .

The link went to a Fab page and on my monitor was the Tenga Deep Throat, a ‘new adult concept for men.’ I’ll let Tenga handle the description, since they do it so goddamn well.

Gentlemen—you’re going to need to lie down for this one. Tenga introduces you to the Deep Cup, a pre-lubed pleasure sleeve designed to replicate the vacuum-like sensation of oral stimulation. While its discreet exterior looks like a sundry bottle, its pre-lubed elastic polymer interior features a complex system of textures that works in conjunction with the distinctive pinched shape and top airflow valve to create incredible tightness and suction. Let Tenga satisfy all your oral fixations.

Yes, I thought. Why shouldn’t an international brand be handling my need for frequent blowjobs? Too long have I messed around with pesky women and their requirements of first dates and mutual attraction and the very real possibility that they might just not want to give me head, or even if they do, will perform it with such tepid enthusiasm that the only thing running through my head while she’s doing so is the refrain “Why bother?”

Fuck. That.

So I tweeted Tenga. Almost immediately, they responded. They were… into it.

@DavidCovucci@BroBible Let’s do it! DM us your details and we’ll contact you tomorrow! (Today is a public holiday here in Japan…)

David: it’s technically one-time use only, which is a shitload to pay for a fake blowjob

J.Camm: you could probably accomplish the same thing by just fucking a jar of Vaseline.

David: also it is designed to look like a sundry bottle, so no one will notice it when i store it alongside my other sundry bottles

J. Camm: Except that it says “Deep Throat Cup” right on the front of it.

David: i think you face it the other way

A day later, a representative from Tenga e-mailed me. They were all for sending me a sex toy. They were all for sending me a lot of sex toys.

Thanks for getting in touch with us! We’re thrilled to hear your request to review our products. Is there one in particular you had in mind? If not, I was thinking perhaps we could send you over one of each of our product Series.

Yea. Sure. Why fuck only one thing once when you can fuck seven different things over seven days? It’d be like the opening chapter of Genesis, only with more splooge.

And on the third day, David ejaculated. And it was good.

. . .

I was home in D.C. from before Christmas until after New Years, so by the time I got back to New York, it had been 13 days since Tenga shipped my stuff and I sliced open the box before even pulling out my laptop to start my day. My coworkers instantly huddled around, like hobos angling for a better spot near a trash can fire. Inside was a veritable HAUL.

(This is where I have to say that all these things came to me for free, and while this isn’t some long-form native ad for Tenga, fuck it. These guys were cool and they make high-quality products and couldn’t have been better to me. So if you are into fucking things that aren’t people, check them out. Also, they just launched a line of couple’s vibrators, which seem like just the thing you need to get the spice back into your relationship (your relationship is lacking spice. … It is.)).

But back to the box. There were … there were so many different things to fuck. Ten toys (although six of them were just different varieties of a single product).

There were egg-shaped pieces of stretchy, soft whatever a polymer is. At the base of them were a little hole and, according to the video we all watched at my desk, you roll it over your penis like a thick condom. Except it feels better, I guess.

The Eggs (there were six of them (half-dozen in egg parlance)) had intimidating names like Spider and Twister and Clicker and … they didn’t sound all that fuckable. Tenga also sent not one but two Deep Throat Cups, a regular and a large, as though penises and amounts of soda dispensed should be measured the same way. The Tenga 3-D Spiral was in there, looking more like an Escher sculpture than a sex toy, and, lastly, was the Tenga Flip Hole, the ultimate death-trap dick-sleeve, which came with three different kinds of lube (Mild! Real! Wild!), and whose end game appeared to be clamping down and forcibly tearing my manhood from my body.

LOOK AT THAT THING. It’s got barbs and orbs and sharp edges and pressure points to squeeze. This is what they stuck your arm in if you were arrested for dissent during the French Revolution. Even after feeling the inside of it, knowing the plastic was soft and incapable off ripping swaths of skin off me, I was still afraid.

(Of course, this being a journalism expedition, I knew my fucking it was a foregone conclusion, possibility of having children later in life be damned).

After tossing Eggs to everyone in the office, like a sexually-depraved Santa Claus, I went home, presenting the favors to my two roommate. They looked visibly perturbed, like when your cat brings in the tattered remains of what once was a squirrel.

“Thank you, yes, but why are all these things designed to reposit your semen in our living room?”

We tentatively inspected the items and it got uncomfortable fast. The pre-lubed pieces were packed to the max, and every time we opened one, lube would explode all over our hands. Which is not how three dudes want to spend a Monday evening in their apartment. They want to be drinking bourbon.

We were doing that as well.

My one roommate, for reasons non-other than being drunk and male, tried to make the Spiral queef. Surprisingly easy, it had an unintended consequence. The noise mimicried a duck call and my dog now alternated between being mesmerized and leaping up and trying to snatch the toys out of our hands.

(This became an actual problem later on, when I tried to … you know … use the toys … on my penis … and my dog sat at ready, greedily eying the plastic pieces ensconcing my dick)

(Yes, that is porn on my laptop. XNXX.com to be precise. Highly recommend it. Also KeezMovies.com. This concludes the part of this story where I tell you about the porn sites I prefer, which, honestly, I did not know was going to happen until just now.)

Then we got drunk.

. . .

There’s always something to me about doing something the first time. I remember all of them well. The first beer I drank was 15 years ago, and it put me on the path to the drunken, debaucherous adult I am now. The first time I got stoned (at an Everclear concert!), I couldn’t wait to try it again. Fifteen years later, I still smoke, with the past decade-and-a-half including two separate, two-year periods where I smoked five times a day. My first cigarette came at the end of second semester of my freshman year in college. I was strung out about meeting our school’s dean after getting caught setting off a fire extinguisher in my dorm. Though I’ve gone through on-and-off periods with cigarettes, I’m on an 18-month stretch of having one almost every single day.

Basically, I find it easy to get addicted to things (and that above list leaves out all the other stuff I enjoy but can’t bring up because my Mom might read this and I’ve already had talks with her about cigarettes and booze and pot and have no desire to discuss cocaine and opiates).

So, when I woke up Tuesday morning—the next morning—ready to masturbate (as I do most every day), I was paranoid that I might be crossing some sort of rubbing one out Rubicon. Would I soon be forever addicted to Japanese sex toys? I checked the prices of these before I got them. Some of the one-time use pieces cost over $15. Would today mark the beginning of a crippling dependency? Would I wind up one day in an alley, sucking dick just so I could afford to pretend to get my dick sucked? Would these toys be so enjoyable that I would become tethered to my bed, discarding one and picking up the next, my only desire in life to continually be inside a fake vagina and nothing else—not meth or nice whiskey or actual attractive women trying to go to town on me—capable of flooding my brain with the same level of serotonin?

And that wasn’t even the worst part. I could live with being a habitual masturbator. I’m one now. What bothered me was that if I used these things, would I be one of THOSE guys?

I’ve always considered myself a normal person. Decent even, depending on who you ask. Could that person be reconciled with the guy who fucks Japanese sex toys alone in his room? I’ve never had a moustache. I don’t want to have a moustache and I don’t want to be one of those guys, the kind of creepy men who, when they take a girl back to their place to have sex for the first time, bring up lube before the girl’s bra is even off.

“I have some … lubrication, if you’d like to try.”

No, that—those guys, the lonely, single males of their mid-40s—those are the guys who dabble in Japanese sex toys. Were they once me? Able-bodied and sociable?

Please, dear God, don’t let that happen to me. I’m doing this for the heck of it. Just to see what it’s like.

I think I said the exact same thing to myself right before this first time I dropped acid.

And much like I held that little beige tab of blotter paper, staring, infatuated with it, I took out the Egg. Held it at arms length. Mine was called Spider.

. . .

The first thing I noticed about using a masturbation aid is that its goddamn inconvenient. Take the Egg, which is the first one I gave a go. When I wake up in the morning and want to masturbate (which may or may not be one of my de facto a.m. behaviors alongside coffee and showering), I can just place my hand on my dick and look at me! I’m jacking off! The barrier to entry is as minimal as existing.

But with this, I first had stand up and get out of bed, since my Egg was in the closet. I hate standing in the morning, but like fuck I’m gonna sleep with a wanking device next to my bed. Imagine if I did and there was a fire and I sprinted out the house, my only regard saving my own life. What would the firefighters say?

“Did you see the weird shit that guy was into?”

“Yea. What kinda fag uses an EGG to get off? Freak.”

So, like, already I was standing up at 8:00 a.m. and not happy. That’s when I noticed the Egg comes with lube—which I kid you not is called Hole Lotion (I can prove this!)

—so I had to go scrounging about for a towel. Like I said earlier, I have two roommates. I can’t just go waddling through our living room and kitchen to our bathroom, dick dripping hole lotion, and still expect to live in our house past January 31st.

So armed, already, with more shit than I usually need to get off, I pulled the cellophane from the Egg. That was covering the plastic container for the actual Egg (boneable Russian nesting dolls!) and already I had all this extraneous trash sitting next to me. I don’t know about you, but jacking it in front of piles of garbage is not how I roll. So I had to get up again to throw that shit out. What I was left with was a quivering, wobbly, soft, white egg, something that looked like it belonged in a bowl of ramen and a small silver packet not unlike what you’re given when you order takeout sushi.

And I’m supposed to convert these things into orgasm?

The lube—excuse me, hole lotion—well, most times I’ve used lube it has been in the dark, in moments of passion, and it is a squirt on my hand, a swipe of my dick and a forgotten memory seconds later. This though, this had the viscosity of honey. I had to tear the packet just right to make a perfect pouring spout, then aim it into the tiny hole and wipe and wipe and wipe the edge of it like a paint brush so my bed wouldn’t be covered in slight sticky Japanese fuck liquid.

All the while, I was left wondering how this could be worth it?

But only because I’d yet to try the disposable, pre-lubed variety.

. . .

The Tenga Deep Throat Cup (on sale at Amazon.com now and, apparently at your local Walgreens) is designed to recreate the feeling of receiving oral sex. It has one hole on the bottom (for your Johnny) and a much smaller one on top where you place and release your finger. That’s there to create “suction,” which—although linguistically confounding—is an essential element of blowjobs.

The apparatus itself is the size of a shampoo bottle and designed to look like one, so you can stash it in public on the off chance you don’t own a closet or are one of those people who gets off on visitors using your bathroom without realizing they are staring directly at things you will eventually ejaculate into (“He didn’t even notice!”).

I recommend the closet.

The cup is single use, which means you can toss it afterward. Pop the bottom bit off. I threw that into my trash can before even starting. No mess on my bed. After I finished, I tossed the bottle into the can as well. Heck, it was almost easier than regular old masturbating.

… I would use it again. I hate to admit it, but I would definitely use it again. It was nice. The suction thing worked and when you alternated on and off, damn, it felt like a real blowjob. Now, I can’t fathom spending another $15 on one and I definitely wouldn’t wash out a used one and buy some more lube even though the directions strongly intimate that it could be reusable, because this path would involve filling this tube with hot, soapy water and hoping I’d be able to rinse all the semen out because of course I came in this thing. It’s supposed to represent a blow job.

But if someone handed me another free one? Fuck yea.

And if this was all I reviewed, I would have said okay. Sex toys are kinda weird. Not my bag, but I don’t begrudge anything about them or even the people who use them. I could see why. It is without a doubt better than regular masturbation, even factoring in how creeped out I felt.

And those Japanese, I would say, boy do they know how to make a piece of plastic resemble the parts of women I prefer to be inside.

But that wasn’t the last thing I tried. I still had to fuck the Flip Hole.

. . .

About the size of two 32 oz. cans of tomatoes stacked on top of each other (and with a similar heft), the Tenga Flip Hole is so unwieldy that it comes with its own stand. And it most certainly does not look like it’s designed for your pleasure. Let’s take a look at that interior once more.

It’s called the Flip Hole because it flips (duh) open, and in that way, closely resembles the Motorola StarTAC you had in tenth grade. That’s so you can easily clean it out and use it again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again, until you either run out of Hole Lotion or die from exhaustion.

Let’s talk about those hole lotions. Three kinds came with the Flip Hole in distinctly test tube-type vials.

Mild, Real and Wild. It seems to me that carving out Real as its own niche is weird. Wouldn’t you want them all to be somewhat “Real.” Isn’t that the point? Why not just have have two: Real Mild and Real Wild, as though they were sauce at Buffalo Wild Wing. Everyone loves Buffalo Wild Wings. But no, three.

Hey, are you curious if each lotion came with its own description? They did.

Mild: Delicately enveloping lubricant that’s MILD.

Real: Moisture rentetive lubricant that feels REAL

Wild: Direct simulation for a feeling that’s WILD.

I decided to try the Real (You are now … listening to … the real) because fuck Mild and because I was slightly scared about what a country that adores animation pornography would consider Wild. It’s probably squid blood.

. . .

What is there to say about the Tenga Flip Hole? Have you ever wondered what it would look like if you stuck your dick in a miniature R2-D2? Or placed it inside a hyperbaric chamber to get more oxygen to your groin? I wish I could share a photo of what it looked like while I was using it, but this is a family website and also you would probably throw up at the penis Singularity you were now faced with. The machines are winning.

I mean, I don’t know. Yea, it felt fine, but the sensation of having my hand a full four inches away from me, while something was in contact with my dick was really weird. It was like, well, in a way, it was like giving yourself a Stranger (which don’t think I’ve tried that. I’m just guessing that’s what it would be akin to. Seriously. I’ve never fucking done that).

And then there’s the whole part where you have to fold it open and lotion it up, tedious preparatory steps to jacking off. Did I mention that you need to be hard before you use any of these toys? I probably should have mentioned that. Like, you have to masturbate before you can masturbate.

When I finish I realized I couldn’t throw it out. I looked up the retail price earlier: $100.

That meant I had to wash it.

I live on the second floor of an apartment in Brooklyn. I couldn’t hose it down outside (even if I could have, this was during the polar vortex and I wouldn’t). And the kitchen sink, that’s where happy food things happen. I wasn’t going to introduce semen to that environment.

So I laid in bed, naked, holding this… bot in my hand, thinking of what to do with it.

There was really only one answer. As much as I disliked it, it was all I could do. So I grabbed my towel and took my toy into the shower with me, my Tenga Flip Hole, needing to be scrubbed down of its hole lotion and its … me.